Tag: twitter

This is my WordPress site. I also use Facebook, Twitter, Identica, Plurk, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and others. To be honest, I’m not a huge social network user. I don’t quite get it when people describe Facebook as an addiction, that ain’t me. I actually avoid the news feed. Twitter I was using more, but then the connection got wiped on my phone, so it’s been a while.

But I do publish on these social networks, and when I do, I want to post on multiple social networks. There are multiple reasons behind this. First and foremost, I want to own my own data. That means, although I want to post on multiple social networks, I absolutely want to post everything to this site. If I post something on Twitter, I want it on my WordPress site as well. I want to have my own record, on my own server, of what I posted when.

Back in the day, I used ping.fm to post to multiple social networks. It worked well enough, I could post by SMS or from an Android app, on their web site, even by email. But then Seesmic acquired ping.fm, and after a while, they shut the service down. I missed it. I mourned it. I stopped posting.

Bottom line, if I can’t post on multiple social networks, I don’t post. I wouldn’t send messages to twitter without also copying them here, and it was manual and laborious. So I decided to build Composer. It builds on the foundation of ping.fm, but takes on a bigger goal. I set out with the vision to create the best place on the internet to write. Full stop.

Composer is in alpha (that comes before beta!) testing right now. It’s live, it’s online, and you can sign up today. Right now you can post to WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Identica, and Plurk, with more in the works.

If you have any feedback at all, just let me know, in the comments below, by email, or through the help pages on Composer.

I use Liferea to consume feeds. In turn, I consume twitter by RSS. However, twitter’s RSS feeds suck. Urls are not clickable, user names are not links, nothing. It’s flat text.

Using Liferea’s ability to locally parse feeds and a little inspiration, I hacked up a sed script to make my twitter feed all pretty. It works great for me, YMMV.

I published the script here, under the GPL. To use it, save the source into a file somewhere, make that file executable, then choose “Use conversion filter” in Liferea and select the file you just created. If you have problems, you could try leaving a comment here, I might be able to help.

The proliferation of “free” is creating a society in which we are exposed to ever more content. It may seem at a macro level like just more crap on YouTube, but at a micro level it’s more crap our friends are creating, sending, forwarding, spamming. I’m calling this social noise. Crap we are exposed to by our friends.

In exploring this topic, let me clarify some of the terms I’ll use.

Social utility. I’ll talk about lots of social utilities, a term borrowed from Facebook’s self description. I consider a social utility to be any technology that allows people to connect. That’s very broad. It includes the telephone, email, blogs, blog comments, facebook, twitter, and a myriad of others.

Free. What do I mean by free? When I talk about free, I mean generally free to use. Email is largely free because it costs me virtually nothing to send you an email. My typing time is actually the most valuable component of the email, so a single email is not really “free”. But when I email 100 of my friends at once, then it becomes free because I typed once, spammed a hundred times.

Noise. When a Facebook friend sends me an invite to an event on another continent, that’s noise. It was free to send me the invite yet it’s totally unrelated to me. Noise. I chose the word noise because of the signal to noise concept. How much stuff do I get through a social utility which I don’t want versus the stuff I do want. That’s signal to noise. Noise is what I don’t want.

Why does free equal noise?

This is a fascinating question. Why does a friend send me an invite to an event in Edinburgh, Scotland even though I’m in Vancouver, Canada? Why do people post rubbish on Twitter that nobody wants to read? Why do friends email me crap that I have no interest in?

Free. It costs them nothing. If I can easily and freely send rubbish to my friends, I will, simply because I can. It’s human nature. Email started out as useful. Imagine sending a message to the other side of the world, for free, instantly. Amazing. As time goes on, that freeness is the very aspect of email that destroys its usefulness. Estimates suggest that more than 90% of all email sent today is spam. Noise.

Now email has a cost. Not to send, but to receive. There is a cost in sorting 100 messages received to find the 3 you actually want to read. We employ spam and virus filtering in a bid to make the task easier. But by automated means, or otherwise, email now has a cost. It is not free to receive email. One must spend resource distinguishing between what we want to receive and what we do not.

Facebook is the same way. At the time of writing, I have some 409 friends on Facebook. That means any one of 409 people can generate content which will flow to me. When I first joined Facebook, I had few friends, there was little cost. I could log in, see what was happening with my friends quickly, move on. Now I need to wade through 409 people’s garbage to find anything useful.

Two Facebook friends recently got engaged. This was posted on their pages as a message. Amongst the diatribe of other nonsense on Facebook I missed that message. Instead I was reading about hair cuts, parties, weather and other useless crap. The noise drowned out the signal.

Now Facebook has a cost. I need to construct friend lists and filters to separate the signal from the noise, the wheat from the chaff. Free to send, it costs to receive. Much like email before it and no doubt Twitter after it. Free creates noise.

What you resist, you strengthen / Change / Resistance / Conclusions

Before I continue, let me state a few assumptions.

You cannot stop progress. Progress currently means more noise. There’s no stopping it. If you try to resist progress, only you will suffer as a result. This is a principle of life. To nerdily quote the borg, resistance is futile.

As the cost of producing content decreases, the volume of content increases. When it’s free to upload videos to YouTube, millions of people do so. As the cost of video editing, photography and other forms of creation comes down, more and more people create.

As an aside, I fully support this democratisation of creation. Everybody becomes an artist, a source of media. Let the masses create I say. Fill YouTube with a trillion videos of teenage angst, crappy comedy and boring music. Let the content flow.

A torrential storm of content is breaking. This is just the beginning. Resisting is futile.

What are we doing? / What do we do about it? / Response / Result

What does it mean? Where will it all go? Will it ever stop? Great questions. Most likely unanswerable except in the fullness of time. Any answers are predictions at best.

How are people responding? This is a question we can answer today. The trend seems to be filtering, sorting, processing. Automated means of distinguishing what we want to see from what we do not want to see. As purely anecdotal evidence, I’ll quote some examples.

Almost every email service now employs spam filtering and virus filtering. These are automated methods to try and separate content from noise. Blog comments are similarly processed. This automated spam filtering is big business in itself.
Guy Kawasaki talks about how to use twitter as a twool [sic]. He says “Get as many followers as you can.” and then “Monitor what people are saying about you”. If you’re following 20’000 people on Twitter it’s impossible to read all those tweets. Instead the advice goes, be selective in what you read, filter.

The Huffington Post apparently employs at least two comment moderators. These are real human people whose job is presumably to read posted comments and sort the content from the noise. Real people employed as human noise filters.

Seth Godin is notorious for taking the opposite approach, he doesn’t take comments on his blog. He says he made the decision because the cost (responding, curating) is too high.

One way or another, the rise of freeness creates a cost. In the age of free content, it costs not to produce content but to consume it. The cost is borne by the recipients, the readers, the moderators, not by the senders, the writers, the creators.

What can we do?

Given the current landscape of freeness and noise, what can we do about it? I’d like to get specific, so here are the challenges I personally face.

I get too much email, most of it I don’t want.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to get useful information out of Facebook.

Reading Twitter is of virtually no benefit to me.

In addition, the subject of blog comments is close to my heart. As I embark on a journey of creating content and sharing it online, I hope to soon have a noise problem.

As I see it, responses to these challenges are all about cost. There is inherent cost in communication. Free communication moves the cost to the recipient. Non free communication shares the cost between sender and recipient. As I see it, these are the two ways of responding. We can either charge the sender and therefore split the cost, or create systems as recipients to better filter content.

In this next section I will outline some ideas to meet these challenges. These ideas might be copied from existing sources, downright wacky, utterly unconventional and potentially complete nonsense. I leave those judgements up to you.

Professional or Personal Assistant

I believe that most companies are filled with too many managers and not nearly enough assistants. I see, time and time again, managers doing tasks which could easily and practically be delegated to assistants.

In this vein, I am considering hiring a personal assistant to perform a few functions. The first will be read all of my email. Personal and otherwise. Read it all, deal with the noise based on a predefined set of rules, and then give me only the content I want. It will take some time and effort to perfect this system, but once in place, I think the payoff will likely be worth it.

I’m also considering what other social utilities I can have filtered by a real person. Could I have my assistant log into Facebook regularly and write a summary of the most significant activity? Would this be cost effective? Can I do the same with Twitter?

This raises other questions. How much training does a personal assistant need? How much of the value of this setup will be contained within the person’s head and how much in the rules that we establish? Lots to consider, this option is an involved one.

Pay per comment

I have considered charging for blog comments. For $20 you can comment on 20 blog posts. I think that if a reader was to spend $1 to respond to a blog post, they would think more carefully before writing.

This raises additional challenges. I believe in offering those who cannot pay a non monetary alternative. That in itself is challenging. Could users also choose to answer 12 (or 25 or 50) captchas instead of paying $1 to post a comment? Some other time consuming task?

How about allowing users to post a selection of pre-defined messages for free. So a simple “Thank you” comment is free, but a comment that requires a follow up has a cost. This might also allow for visual separation of comments. All the “Thank you” comments could be grouped, listing only the names of the people who said “Thank you”.

Automated trust / Feedback / Trust

Crowdsource the cost. As content is posted, allow users to “rate” the content. As positive ratings flow, the content is highlighted. As negative ratings flow the content is hidden.

This model could be applied to many areas from blog comments to Facebook status updates to Twitter tweets. It’s possible to use global or local models. In a global model all positive / negative feedbacks are grouped. In a local model only my friends and friends of my friends feedback matters to me.

There is an inherent challenge in this. It requires users to see some raw output in order to split that output into content and noise. This leaves an opening for spam, even if fewer people see the spam because it is quickly hidden, the cost to the sender is free, so the economy of scale will allow spam to continue.

Resign

I’m seriously considering resigning from Twitter. I gain almost no value whatsoever from my Twitter account. It’s virtually worthless, yet it consumes my time. Facebook is a less obvious example. I gain some value from Facebook, but primarily only from direct, personal content. When a friend sends me a message, replies to my status, these are messages I want to see. When somebody spams me about an event on another continent, that’s noise.

I could try to reduce my Facebook noise by ignoring all invitations and all group messages. I don’t think Facebook currently allows me to do this automatically, so it may require some work on my part. Perhaps this ties into the Professional / Personal Assistant option.

Campaigning

There is a site dedicated to spreading the word about BCC. Send emails to multiple people, put them in BCC not TO. You could consider this to be a campaign. Try to educate people on polite, sensible use of the new technologies available to us. Unfortunately, these campaigns are largely ineffective. They face a couple of challenges.

Firstly, only true friends actually care. The people who send commercial spam really don’t care. They know what they’re doing, they’re doing it anyway, so trying to urge them to do otherwise is not likely to be effective. At least not in a gentle campaign type way.

Secondly, these campaigns take such a long time and require so much effort, the problem has likely moved to a new social utility before any real impact is felt. Personally, I see fewer and fewer emails where a hundred people are in the TO field. Mostly, people in my circles are learning to use BCC. However, that does not appear to have any effect on the level of Facebook crap I receive. So the BCC campaign may be successful, but it doesn’t seem to help the next place the same problem arises.

Having said all that, I think campaigns are the ultimate, long term solution. Only through education can we change habits. In time, as people become increasingly comfortable with new social utilities (not some new service, but the idea that there are forever “new” utilities), the norms of politeness and manners will adapt. But we’ll all have drowned in a quagmire of crap by then unless we find solutions in the mean time.

I need to have skype installed and running, but now I can send / receive messages from within pidgin. On linux, this is a big deal. The skype interface sucks. It lacks spell check, among other things. Now I can even send encrypted, deniable messages through Skype with the Off The Record plugin. All my other pidgin plugins work with Skype. Fantastic. Get the plugin here. (It works for poor people on Windows also).

More and more people have started talking to me on Facebook chat. The interface was a little ropey, I much prefer talking to people in Pidgin. For example, when somebody sends me a message, a web site has no way of letting me know. So if Facebook is open but not on the screen (say on another tab) I miss the messages. Pidgin on the other hand is great for that. Now pidgin supports facebook chat.

I haven’t actually activated this plugin yet, but I have installed it. I believe it allows you to set / get Twitter messages via Pidgin. I like that idea a lot. I really liked Twitter’s IM service (before it died). But now I’m using ping.fm (invite code vivalaping) to update all my statuses in one go. So Twitter only via IM might be a bit weird. I can post to ping.fm through IM no problems, they have a Jabber interface.

Plugin Pack

Before I forget, I recently installed the available plugins from the Ubuntu repository. I grabbed all the pidgin related plugin packs that looked good. That made a big difference. Added Extra Prefs and Off The Record Messaging which were the biggest changes I think.

Pidgin is on a new level today. 🙂 Here’s a pretty picture for all you visual / non techy types out there.

Twitter really has become ubiquitous technology. Everyone’s on it. If only they could come out with a revenue model, make some money, hire some more brains, and sort out their reliability issues. On a plus note, they’re recently blogging about failures or outages, which is nice.

To install on Fedora (and possibly others) simply grab the .deb file Dossy kindly published here. Open the .deb in archive manager. Open the contained data.tar.gz file. Then drop the contained “convcharcount.la” and “convcharcount.so” files into your /usr/lib/pidgin/ directory. You’ll need to do this as root.

Now open Pidgin (restart is not required), Tools > Plugins, and tick the conv. input character count plugin. Bingo, it works like a charm for me on Fedora 8 with Pidgin 2.4.1. Thanks Dossy. 🙂

It’s taken a while for me to notice, but I don’t get any messages from Twitter any more. I no longer receive SMS notifications, or IM notifications, or anything else for that matter. I just don’t get updates. I’ll probably have to start reading twitter via RSS. Bah.

I wonder how it will affect Twitter’s business. They’re so popular the system can’t cope. Yet they still haven’t shown a clear revenue model. Who’s crazy enough to be paying for the whole thing? It all sounds very .com bubble to me.